If you follow me you know I've written an article about IOTA (German) three weeks ago where I say that I believe it's undervalued. Well, since then there were some major news which makes me even more confident. And if you think bad about IOTA please read this article!
The first and most relevant news
is the post by Multicoin Capital. Tldr; "[They] have several [four] major concerns with the implementation of IOTA that make [them] highly skeptical of its lofty claims." My answers are below the statements:
- The IOTA Coordinator is Centralized
Valid - The coordinator is currently centralized, but there are plans for the future to decentralize it. The first step is to delegate the coordinators until the "critical mass" is reached when they get shut down completely. David Sønstebø compares this with a child who learns cycling. This also needs stabilizers and a helmet until it has the balance. source1 / source2==video linked below - IOTA Requires Hardware Changes to IoT Devices
The IoT devices itself needs a ternary processor to do the PoW itself. Anyway, the PoW can be outsourced for devices that don't have an ternary processor. IOTA and JINN will publish this year (probably Q1 2018) the first ternary processors and there are rumors that BOSCH is already building them. source - The Network Has Experienced Downtime
This is a project in its early phase with a new technology. Better they shut down the network (as long as they are able with centralized coordinators) to resolve an bug or stop an attack than they do nothing. This is nothing special. - Cryptography and Software Vulnerabilities ❗️❗️❗️(important)
And this is not true! DCI at the MIT Media Lab made some big allegations that the crypto used by IOTA is insecure a while ago, without providing solid proof for it. Now they finally provided a proof of concept piece of code which apparently isn't proving any vulnerability at all. source - read more - and more - last but not leas watch the video below
So yes IOTA is in early stage. There are a lot of points that has to be improved. But it's not overvalued or even worthless as a lot of people think, on the contrary, it's undervalued at least in my opinion. But to be fair, I also hold some MIOTA, so I might be biased.
The second news
is that big companies work with - and some also invest in - IOTA. I don't want to dive in too deep, it is simply a good sign that such large companies believe in the project. For more information I have linked the corresponding articles.
- Johann Jungwirth, the Volkswagen's Chief Digital Officer joined the IOTA foundations supervisory board.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/montymunford/2018/01/23/volkswagens-chief-digital-officer-joins-cryptocurrency-iota-foundations-supervisory-board/#27aca80e6fd6 - Bosch launched their next commercial IoT hardware, the XDK-110 with IOTA
https://theindependentrepublic.com/2018/01/27/boschs-new-iot-adaptor-xdk110-and-how-it-is-related-to-iota-miota/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/7sxgx0/bosch_ama_january_25th/ - A list of all IOTA data marketplace participants
https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/7teltq/iota_data_marketplace_participants
The third news
is the hack of the IOTA wallets. The wallet is pretty user unfriendly and has a bad UX but the biggest problem is that it doesn't have an implemented Seed generator. When I first installed the wallet I had to check what a Seed is and how to create it and yes I also used the malicious website to generate the IOTA seed but I didn't lost any money because I never use online generated Private Keys / Seeds and stuff like that. But a lot if people trusted this site (I don't link to it). But that's like asking someone on the street: "Here a $50. Can you buy me a keyhole and the key and send it to the address of my house?" And then hope that this person doesn't have a copy of the key to break in. Probably not the best example but I think you get the point. Especially in the highly unregulated cryptocurrency market with so much scammers. I hope this will get addressed with the new trinity wallet (open beta) coming these weeks. The problem why the current wallet is so bad is that it was never a priority for IOTA to create a wallet, which was imho bad. Here's a good article about new wallets.
Btw. there's currently a new phishing site around: https://www.iota-wallet.me/ Don't use that. But it seems the site is already down.
The fourth news
is probably not as big as the other ones but Ivan On Tech a huge YouTuber in the cryptocurrency space made a Q&A with David Sønstebø.
I encourage everyone who still has a bad opinion about IOTA to watch this video.
It is about an hour long, but you can listen to it while driving or before going to sleep, because the sound is sufficient.
Leave a comment about your opinion about all these concerns, the wallet hack and the future of IOTA 🙂
